Race In North America: Origin And Evolution Of A Worldview - Hardcover

Smedley, Audrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813306213 ISBN 13: 9780813306216

Publisher: Westview Press, 1993

Synopsis

Few topics in the Western intellectual tradition have been subjected to as much scrutiny and analysis as the topic of race. In the eighteenth century, a prevailing belief in biologically exclusive and permanently unequal human groups, each with distinctive behavioral, moral, spiritual, and intellectual characteristics, led people to see biophysical and behavioral features as innate and immutable. In the nineteenth century, differences between whites, Indians, and Africans were magnified in the popular mind and in scholarly writings to the point that these groups were seen as separate species, justifying the preservation of "racial" slavery and the subsequent dehumanization of freed blacks. With the application in the late nineteenth century of the racial worldview to European peoples and the subsequent twentieth-century inhumanity and brutality of Nazi race ideology, the concept of race came under attack. Liberal ideology coupled with advances in science prompted criticism of "race" and efforts to eliminate the term from the lexicon of science.
In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race through three centuries of North American history, Audrey Smedley shows race to be a cultural construct used variously and opportunistically throughout time, although the scientific record shows little common agreement on its meaning. Tracing the social and historical processes that helped shape the idea of race, Smedley argues that race was and is a folk worldview, fabricated as an existential reality out of elements of English cultural history and the conquest and enslavement of physically distinct populations. The schism between science and popular thought on race, which appeared in the mid-twentieth century, continues today. If progressive scientists no longer accept the biological idea of race, will society eventually also reject it?

About this title

About the Author

Audrey Smedley is professor emerita of anthropology and African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Review

In this fourth edition, Drs. Audrey Smedley and Brian Smedley describe, in a scholarly but widely accessible and engaging manner, the evolution of the concept of race and the way shifting views of the meaning of race have shaped North America. The book is an essential resource for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of race and race relations in North America.”
—John F. Dovidio, Yale University

Race in North America is an essential text for anyone who engages race' from the early modern period to the present. ...Eminently suitable for a range of learners, from undergraduates to researchers, the book is critical to courses and writings on the ways in which race has been, and continues to be, socially constructed in the Anglo world.”
—Laura A. Lewis, James Madison University

This much anticipated new edition continues the global exploration of the roots of race and racism and reveals how structural racism maintains disparities in the modern age. Followers of the epistemology of race and racism will get a historically broader and detailed explanation of why we think about groups of people the way we do today.”
—Janis Hutchinson, University of Houston

Edition details

• Publisher: Westview Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0813306213
• ISBN 13: 9780813306216
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340